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User blog:HowStrongIs/The Speed of Able, SCP-076-2 (SCP Foundation)
---- Both in the original article and in tales Able is described as being capable of swatting bullets out of the air. This isn't entirely casual, he can still be tagged by them while momentarily distracted, but it's still a great example of reflex speed in the SCPverse. Because of that, and the relatively quantifiable nature of these, I've decided to do a calc on this couple of feats. The first one is easy. Both distance and time are given. But the second one requires a few more assumptions. Firstly, the distance. We know he was close enough to have a knife lobbed at him, and knife throwing is usually considered "difficult" at a distance of about 5 m, though this is for competitions. With sufficient speed a knife can be thrown around 10 m even at a low throwing angle. Because of this, it's not unreasonable to believe Able was standing somewhere between 5'''-'''10 m away from the shooter at the time of this feat. The second figure we need is the speed of the bullets. This actually requires pretty much no assumptions. Just a couple lines before the second quote the gun is said to be a "Squad Automatic Weapon". In the US, this usually refers to a M249 light machine gun, which has a muzzle velocity of 915 m/s. That gives us all we need. ------ v = d/t *d = 64 m *t = 3 s 64/3 = 21.3 m/s ------ t = d/v *d = 5 m *v = 915 m/s 5/915 = 5.4 milliseconds *d = 10 m *v = 915 m/s 10/915 = 10.9 milliseconds ------ Results *The Speed of Able (Travel) - 21.3 m/s *The Speed of Able (Reaction Time) - 5.4 to 10.9 milliseconds ------ Potential Problems With This Calc *The knife thrower and the shooter are not the same person, the shooter is behind the knife thrower. There would be more distance between the shooter and the knife thrower than represented here. Personally, I think at the very least 10 meters would cover the likely distance between him and the shooter, since that's a high-end for the distance to the knife thrower anyway. But regardless, some extra distance should be added just to be safe. If we assume that there's an extra 5 meters between the knife thrower and the shooter, that would bring this feat down to Able reacting in 16.4 milliseconds. This is still over 6x as fast as the fastest human reflex. ------ Notes *If Able moves his hand even just 0.3 meters (about a foot) to block the incoming bullet, that would make his hand speed anywhere between 18.3 and 55.6 m/s, not accounting for acceleration and depending on which assumption you pick from above. If you make the (fairly silly) assumption that Able's stats are scaled up 1:1 from a human, then his hand speed should be at least 87 m/s, based on the calculation of him being 6x faster than the fastest human reflex and the quickest punches in boxing. Category:Blog posts Category:Calculation